


Mentor

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Captain John Watson, Established Relationship, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, M/M, Old Married Couple, PTSD John, Sherlock is a Good Boyfriend, Story: The Adventure of the Crooked Man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-14 23:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13600926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: It takes a wounded subcontinental soldier to help a wounded subcontinental soldier.





	Mentor

**Author's Note:**

> The story takes place after the events of the ACD story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man.”

At the conclusion of most of the cases taken by my friend and companion Mr. Sherlock Holmes, both of us were able to leave them behind and return to our lives without them affecting us any further. But some cases do not readily leave our minds, and can haunt long after their conclusion. One such, for me, was our investigation into the death of Colonel James Barclay of Aldershot.

Holmes’ discovery of Corporal Henry Wood laid bare the events that led up to the Colonel’s death and freed his widow Nancy from the suspicion of murder; the case was solved and we returned home. But Wood’s account – a tale of treachery, the tragedy of a stolen life and lost love, and bitter retribution – caught at my imagination and would not let go. I was transfixed by my own wartime memories.

Not a week after our return to Baker Street I sat at my writing desk, notebook beside me and foolscap before me, prepared to write down the case. I stared at the blank sheet; but the words would not leave the turmoil in my brain to lie still on the paper.

The sweet smell of tobacco preceded the appearance of a cigar box at my elbow. “My dear,” said the beloved voice, “you are still thinking of Corporal Wood’s fate.”

I managed a mirthless chuckle and a little nod as I helped myself; the cigar was welcome, and even more welcome was the tender press of my spouse’s thin lips to my temple. “Even I can deduce how you followed my train of thought this time, Holmes. Yes, his plight will not leave me.”

“Perhaps because your own experience was an echo of what he endured. Or do you deny that you dream of Afghanistan once again?”

I shook my head as I busied myself with the cigar; I accepted the proffered lit match and the warm hand cupping my cheek as I drew in the first sweet draught of tobacco to steady my nerves. “Not at all. Which is why I have exiled myself to the upstairs bed, poor fellow.” I patted Holmes’ hand on my shoulder and smiled up at him. “I have no wish to disturb your own sleep.” We did not always spend the night together in Holmes’ bed, but I had made my own room rather more a habit this time than was usual; four nights since we’d returned and my sleep was as restless as when I’d first been invalided. When I did sleep I awoke gasping amid Kandahar heat and dust, my ears ringing from cannon-fire and men screaming for the doctor; and through them hobbled a hunchbacked grotesquerie of a man, his grey-bearded face brown and seamed as a walnut, his yellowed eyes transfixing mine.

Sherlock Holmes’ face was as calm and expressionless as when he asked distraught clients to tell their tale, and it was as reassuring for me as it surely was for them. I exhaled, and the cigar smoke seemed to loosen the knot inside me. The words came out easily now.

“It is not my dreams that tear at me, Holmes. It is my waking thoughts of Corporal Wood that do so.” Over and over in my mind’s eye I replayed our last image of the bent-backed old soldier hunched over a fire in his hovel of a room on a warm summer day. “When I looked at him, I saw myself when I first came to London – a broken shell of a man, useless, friendless, alone in the world.” I smiled at the firm squeeze to my shoulder that was my friend’s only physical response. “I was a good deal luckier – I was introduced to a handsome madman stabbing himself in a laboratory and decided I ought to share digs with the fellow. It was the saving of me.” My heart sank as I returned to my thoughts. “But what of Wood? There is a terrible paucity of Sherlock Holmeses in Aldershot for him.”

After a long pause, my friend spoke. His voice was level and cool. “The injustice rankles you.”

“Yes.” The word almost came out as a hiss. I gripped my cigar so hard I bent it.

 _Injustice_ – the very word for the canker that had eaten at me as I’d heard the soldier’s story unfold.

Corporal Henry Wood’s life was stolen from him because he’d volunteered for a mission that his romantic rival had deliberately sabotaged – stolen and broken a piece at a time, over decades, until he’d returned to his home soil an old and ruined man. Nancy Barclay had discovered to her horror that the man she’d wed had sent her beau to his death so that he could press her hand, and her entire marriage was built on a sham. And Colonel Barclay himself had clearly suffered the rest of his life for his treachery, his conscience as able a torturer as any of Wood’s captors, and his own flesh had struck him dead at the sight of the returned Wood. The guilty party was punished; yet the damage was done, with one life lost and two others irretrievably changed. 

My heart ached to think that a brave soldier who’d done his duty had been repaid with the loss of his love, a lifetime of horrendous pain and hardship, a misshapen body, and poverty. Now, at an age when a man starts to think of retirement, Henry Wood played conjuror tricks for the meager pennies that barely kept him from the poorhouse. Injustice was the only word for it.

Our business, our work – surely it included seeing justice done. Could I help bring any kind of justice to the man – and in so doing, bring peace to my own mind? What could I possibly do to ease the life of this older, greyer mirror-image of myself?

My friend’s voice echoed in my head (though Holmes himself only stood beside me in silent support and let me cogitate, as devoted a helpmeet as he was a friend): _Eliminate the impossible…_

I couldn’t help Wood as a doctor – his scarred flesh and poorly-set bones were beyond the help of modern medicine. Impossible.

I could not return the thirty years the corporal had lost as a captive; HG Wells’ fanciful machine was only a fiction. Impossible.

As a writer I could air the truth of the whole sordid affair to the light of day (if I could only _begin_ the dratted thing), and that would at least set the record straight about the true character of Colonel Barclay. I smiled a little, thinking of how shocked the Army would be to learn that one of their men presumed dead decades ago was still –

I let out a cry as my realization hit me.

“Wood is still dead!”

Holmes’ hand slipped off my shoulder as I whirled to face him. His own grey eyes were alight. He saw it too.

“Corporal Henry Wood is very likely on the Lists as _Missing, Presumed Dead_ , would have been ever since that night.” My words tumbled out in my eagerness. “If the proof is presented that he’s alive, _and_ he can be convinced to testify that he took injury in enemy action in the performance of his duties –“

“Wouldn’t he have a considerable amount of back pay owed him?” Sherlock Holmes concluded.

The smile on my face mirrored Holmes’ own. “And even if they don’t reimburse him, at the very least he’ll be reinstated on the List as _Wounded_ and receive a pension. Even a small one would be a windfall compared to what he lives upon now!”

How absurdly simple.

I whirled back to the blank paper that had taunted me with my impotence minutes ago, and now the words flew out of my pen as if the deadline loomed at day’s end. This was not the start of my case-notes for “The Adventure of the Crooked Man,” but a letter to the War Office, writing as a former officer of Her Majesty, late of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, and veteran of Maiwand, who wished to call their attention to the true status and condition of one of the casualties of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

#

To no one’s surprise, a good deal of bureaucratic rigmarole is required to resurrect a dead man in the eyes of the Army and the Office of the Pensioners. Fortunately the situation took months to resolve; I say fortunately because Nancy Barclay had required time to recover from her series of terrible shocks – including witnessing the death of her husband – but once so recovered she was Wood’s staunchest advocate. My assessment of her, the one time I went down to testify in a hearing, was that of a woman determined to right a wrong; she promised an evolution into a formidable Army widow. To my relief (and hers), neither she nor Wood had to tell the whole sordid story to the board of inquiry; Mrs. Barclay’s memories of the Mutiny and her status as a respectable officer’s widow were enough to convince them that the battered old man in their courtroom was indeed the missing-and-presumed-dead Corporal Henry Wood.

Once the Army machinery was sent into motion, my own involvement with the case receded. Yet that letter was enough to ease my mind and quiet my dreams, and I returned to my rightful sleeping arrangements. (When I dreamed of a Ghazi charge only to feel arms behind me that pulled me into hiding, I awoke in Holmes’ embrace, and to his great pleasure I knew exactly how to thank him.)

The morning I received a letter from Henry Wood stating that he had begun receiving his wound pension, not even the January cold aggravating my old injuries could take away my smile. I told Holmes that he would be on his own that day, and he smiled and told me to give the corporal his regards.

#

The Henry Wood who greeted me at the door of his Hudson Street lodgings in Aldershot was a changed man. He was still grotesquely bent-backed, but now he was also clean-shaven and clad in clean new English garments with a close-fitting wool cap. He had put on flesh and his eyes were brighter. “God bless you, sir, for what you’ve done,” he said in his raspy voice.

I waved it aside as he invited me in. “A good soldier does not leave a comrade behind.”

Wood’s grin was less cheery and more savage. “Aye, and bad soldiers get their comeuppance don’t they?”

I laughed in the same savage mode – one that would have alarmed my civilian lover. “It just took the jackals a little longer to find Barclay.”

Wood’s rooms were still small and simply furnished, but coal filled the scuttle and crackled from the hearth, and food lay on the table. But the biggest change was the relaxation in Wood’s body and face, a man who no longer scrabbled for hand-to-mouth living. No, the pension couldn’t restore his lost years or fix his broken body; but it clearly eased his life now.

“Had to change clothes,” he laughed – a real laugh and not a bitter cackle. “I filled out so much my old slops didn’t fit any more! And I’ve been to a doctor.”

“Your eyes do look better,” said I. Treatment for jaundice or malaria; another benefit of leisure and a full purse.

Teddy waddled into the room, and I laughed; the lithe little mongoose now looked more like a German sausage than a cobra-hunter. He too had benefited from his master’s good fortune. “We haven’t had to put on our show for a month now, have we Ted?” the corporal said, scratching the creature’s back. “This is all still a bit of a blur. Months now, and I’m still getting used to _living_ , and not just waiting to die.”

Now for the worst infection. Scalpel poised. “And…Nancy?” I asked.

Wood’s face was expressionless. “Still in black for that bastard.”

I smiled again. “But not in mourning, I think. You’re not the only one Barclay deceived. I know a thing or two about women, and I’ve met Mrs. Barclay. Mark my words, she’ll shed her widow’s weeds the very hour that protocol permits.”

Wood nodded. “I think as you do, there.” He smiled, creasing his face even more now that he no longer bore his beard. “She’s been a friend in need these months. As were you, Doctor.”

Not friendless and alone – any more than I had been, because I’d had Stamford and then Holmes. Wood too had friends, and counted me among them.

“But when she’s done with her year? I’ll still be a bent-backed ugly old man with a pittance,” Wood finished, with a touch of his old bitterness. “Not the young fit good-looking chap she loved, the one with his future ahead of him.”

Stamford had been a friend in need when he had led me to what was to have been a mere flat-share, but which in the end became home and friendship and livelihood and love. I could do no less for Wood; I could not and would not speak for the lady, but I could lead the man to consider the possibility.

“She may have a different opinion on that subject. Few women are so shallow in matters of the heart as to change their minds over a mere physical alteration. As for your ages, and your time apart?” Now for the crux, the reason I’d travelled here in person rather than simply write Wood back. “I have a gift for you.”

I handed him a wrapped square parcel. Wood stared at the parcel and then at me, before reaching for the string.

I spoke as he unwrapped the gift. “You may have read this one already, but it bears repeating. A soldier is kept away from his home for years by cruel fate, trying to return to the woman he loves. Who, in this story at least, welcomes him back as if he was never gone.”

The crooked man looked at the unwrapped edition of _The Odyssey_. When he looked up at me tears gleamed in his eyes.

I smiled at him. “We can but try.” I stood. “Best of luck, Corporal.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Wood rasped, hand rubbing at his face.

And leaving Wood to ponder the possibility of love, I returned to my own.

**Author's Note:**

> A reprint from the Summer 2017 issue (Vol. 5) of _The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture_ , which had had the theme of “Doctors & Soldiers.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Mentor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14805767) by [OldShrewsburyian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian)




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